Stone Mountain: Late May

 The clouds were on the mountain, whisps of gray blending into the stone face. The mountaintop was hiding.

The forest below was dark and loud. Dark because the sky was low and the canopy is now dense. If you were taking photographs, you’d have to use a flash. Loud because every rivulet, run, creek and stream was singing.

I’m not sure the Big Dog was ever out of earshot of running water. When he was a puppy, Gunter, a German shepherd, decided that running water was running amok — it was something that needed to be herded and nipped into better behavior. He’s 8 now, between mature and old, and still chastising running water. He reminds me of Xerxes, who ordered his soldiers to whip the waters of the Hellespont.

We also heard, but never saw, a pileated woodpecker. Their calls are unmistakable.

One of the sounds we didn’t hear was the barking of squirrels. The Georgia Piedmont is wonderful habitat for squirrels, and when I finally noticed the absence of squirrel racket I wondered when we’d see a raptor.

The answer: Almost immediately.

It flashed by on a slalom through the trees, so I didn’t get a good look. I’d guess it was a Cooper’s hawk.

From one invasive to another

 The oakleaf hydrangeas are rioting all around Stone Mountain. Hydrangea quercifolia is showy: it’s a big bush — taller than I am — with cream flowers. It’s also a native.

Seeing the blossoms in the forest makes me wonder why people who love showy flowers were dissatisfied with the natives and imported plants we now consider invasive.

If you look on the forest floor, you’ll find young empress trees, Paulownia tomentosa. Picture a belt-high shrub with leaves the size of platters, rather than dinner plates. Young bigleaf magnolias have enormous leaves, but they are oblong. The leaves of empress trees are hearts.

Empress trees have a mixed reputation in the Piedmont. Some gardeners love them for their spectacular flowers. Jimmy Carter grew them. Others revile them as an invasive species that takes resources from the natives. Connecticut banned them.

I don’t know what to make of the controversy. 

The trees came from Asia to Europe in the 1830s and to the United States a decade later.

They are naturalized in the Eastern United States. They have been on American soil longer than many human families.

The fossil record shows Paulownia was once in North America but died out before Homo sapiens arrived. It’s puzzling when one invasive species encounters another.

I still don’t know what, if anything, to do about Paulownia. But if you are trying to understand how these trees got to the United States, I’d recommend the work of Dr. Whitney Adrienne Snow, a history professor at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. Her work strikes me as a model.

• Sources: Whitney Adrienne Snow, “Ornamental crop, or invasive? The history of the Empress tree (Paulownia) in the USA”; Forests Trees and Livelihoods, 24:285-96. It’s here:

https://cdn.worldtree.eco/wp-content/uploads/Snow-2015-Ornamental-crop-or-invasive-The-history-of-the-Empress-tree-Paulownia-in-the-USA.pdf

The North Carolina Extension Service has an article here:

https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/paulownia-tomentosa/

Trying to stop the flow

 Recent notes perhaps belabored the point that breaking the connection between people and the land is a bad idea. The suffering caused when native peoples were driven from Georgia under the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was unimaginable.

The stories in history books and memoirs are horrific. But a line from a technical report about the state’s mineral springs struck me with the force of poetry:

 

The Indians are said to have considered these waters of great

medicinal value and when they were driven from the country it

is reported that they endeavored to stop the flow of the springs by

driving pegs in the fissure of the rock from which the water issued.

 

The note is about Catoosa Springs near the Tennessee border. The Cherokee people believed the waters were healing and powerful. They did not want the land and its waters to nurture the hated people who took them.

• Sources: S.W. McCallie, A Preliminary Report on the Mineral Springs of Georgia; Atlanta: Chas. P. Byrd, state printer, 1913, p. 49. This was Bulletin No. 20 in the U.S. Geological Survey. The Digital Library of Georgia has it here:

https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_ggpd_s-ga-bm500-pg4-bb1-bno-p-b20

For an earlier note on the report, see “Mineral springs,” March 27, 2025.

Something between grief and gratitude

 It’s painful when an old friend dies. Having a collection of your friend’s letters and essays might not count as consolation, but it is something.

Here’s a line written by my friend Dr. Melvyn Schreiber, who died in October:

 

My kind will soon be extinct, and I like to think that will be a loss.

 

That was in a paragraph about how Melvyn loved to teach and practice medicine. Melvyn had a soft heart, but some physicians called him the conscience of the committee that ruled on medical students: thumbs up or down. Melvyn hated telling students that their dreams had derailed, but he did. He was aware of and honest about the medical profession’s capacity to do harm as well as good.

He often asked students what they were reading for pleasure and posed question about literature. He talked Shakespeare and then switched languages and talked Beethoven and Puccini. He told students they would have bad days as doctors and they needed to have an intellectual and artistic life outside of medicine to help them maintain a sense of balance.

Grief is a mysterious thing, but when you read a friend’s letters and feel gratitude … well, that’s something if it’s not consolation.

Today would have been Melvyn’s 94^th birthday. 

‘A rural looker’

 Imagine a bus ride from Wormingford to Hadleigh in Sussex. It’s a bit more than 13 miles. We’re going by bus because one of the passengers is the writer Ronald Blythe, who doesn’t drive.

As the bus travels through the countryside, Blythe notices the wild teasel, Dipsacus fullonum, growing in a field.

Blythe notices it because he expects it to be there. He’s been filling out the Wild Flower Society’s registry for years. He knows what native plants grow on what farms, although he sometimes wonders whether it’s worth all the trouble.

 

But one feels guilty when one ceases to take note of plants. Those who did so incurred the wrath of John Clare. He was a rural looker. Nothing growing, flying, running, swimming, taking to its bed in autumn escaped his eye, and he would lash out at villagers who stumped to and fro in Helpston, apparently not seeing a thing.

 

The fellow sitting next to Blythe on the bus doesn’t notice the bank of wild teasel and apparently is one of those people who doesn’t see a thing. Unlike the poet John Clare, Blythe doesn’t lash out. He keeps his thoughts to himself and goes on.

In Hadleigh, the passengers look at the shoppers on the streets and rustle for their things. When the bus turns, Blythe thinks about the Rev. Rowland Taylor, who was led down Angel Street to be burned at the stake in 1554. Taylor, a student of Erasmus, believed in education. The town was full of weavers in those days, and Taylor was so diligent about the church’s responsibilities for educating the common people that wits claimed Hadleigh was a little university town.

Blythe is lost in thought about the cruelty of religious wars and the damage done to working people  when zealots come to power.

The fellow sitting next to Blythe doesn’t know any of that history and so is not thinking about any of those things. He’s just glad the bus trip is over.

Imagine two human beings, sitting side by side, doing something as ordinary as taking a bus ride to a market town to do some shopping. One is engaged, thinking about what he’s seeing, thinking about what it’s like to live in the place he calls home.

The other has been on the same bus ride and is bored.

Two people can live similar lives in a way. One finds it fascinating, and the other is tired of it. I want to sit next to the guy who’s fascinated.

Blythe, who died aged 100 in 2023, is the kind of writer I like to read.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 393.

Remembering Isaac Rosenberg

 How to observe Memorial Day?

When in doubt, let the poets speak.

Isaac Rosenberg, a British painter and a poet, told friends he didn’t sign up for the Great War for patriotic reasons. He thought everyone enlisted for the same reason: The country was in trouble, and people wanted to get it over.

Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” begins with these lines:

 

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

 

The poet says the rat seems to like his chances for living better than those of the soldiers.

Rosenberg was killed April 1, 1918.

• Isaac Rosenberg, “Break of Day in the Trenches”; Poetry Magazine, December 1916. It’s available here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13535/break-of-day-in-the-trenches

A birthplace in ashes

 Ronald Blythe grew up in a family of farm laborers in East Anglia between the world wars. Farm laborers were horribly poor in the decades before they finally disappeared.

Wages were low, and housing was spartan. The house Blythe was born in burned down. As an older man, he visited the place and wrote these lines:

 

I would have been three or four when we moved. All I can remember was the night when a wild swan came down the chimney and beat about the papered bedroom in terror, creating havoc, they say. My parents’ shouts remain in my ears like an equal terror.

The house was thatched, and birds and rats slept in its roof. No country person had a dwelling all to himself then. 

 

Farm hands by the hundreds worked the fields, tending and harvesting crops before machines and economics drove them into the cities. The farm workers didn’t just contribute to the rural communities. They were the communities. They supported the church, sent their kids to school and the village merchants. When all those workers and their families were gone, rural communities collapsed.

Similar forces were at work in this country. A lot of the places where the political climate is most irrational are rural places that once had thriving communities based on agriculture. Those left behind are beyond angry.

Blythe had no nostalgia for the kind of labor that farms required in the old days. But something was lost when the connection between ordinary people and the land was severed.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 437.